Spirit, NASA Martian Exploration Rover, Dies at 6 (Earth Years)

NASA's Martian Exploration Rover, Spirit, could not pull itself from its sandy resting place on Mars and has been downgraded to an operational science station. While Spirit will continue to record scientific observations and snap photos, Spirit the Rover is no more.

January 27, 2010 (Popular Mechanics Online) – The Spirit Rover, which explored the surface of Mars for over half a decade, discovering pivotal evidence of the past existence of water, was consigned to her final resting place on the north face of the Troy plateau on January 26, 2009. She was nearly 3.4 Martian years old (six Earth years).

In April 2009, Spirit, which had a life-expectancy of only 90 days, rolled towards her fateful finale, already dragging a crippled right wheel towards the Gusev crater. Suddenly, one of the rover's wheels broke through the surface and got stuck—irreversibly—in the Martian sand.

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Spirit left Earth on June 10, 2003, and began an eight-month-long trip through the solar system. After bouncing to a stop on the surface of the red planet, Spirit emerged from her landing craft, sidestepped a partially deployed parachute, and placed her six wheels on Martian soil. It was January 15, 2004. From that point onward, the golf cart–size rover proved to be a dogged, tenacious explorer—often laboring for weeks at a time to traverse steep craters and continuously performing geological experiments with her robotic arm.

Survival was difficult on the Martian surface, where temperatures dip below minus 90 C nightly and massive dust storms can at times engulf half the planet. Spirit suffered many close calls, the first of which occurred several days after touchdown, when scientists lost contact with the rover for 48 tense hours. Diagnostic tests confirmed that Spirit had filled up her memory banks and could not boot up her computer. A bevy of Earth-side scientists corrected the problem and Spirit began her years-long journey.

She drove over 5 miles during the course of her lifetime.

To survive harsh Martian winters up to 300 million miles from the nearest team of rescuers, Spirit spent months driving toward areas of maximum sunlight. On a north-facing slope, the rover was able to collect enough light to raise her power levels to a functioning level. As the sun moved across the northern sky, the rover tracked it meticulously, absorbing energy to be used for exploration in the new year.

Toward the end of her actual operational lifetime, Spirit spent an increasing amount of time resting comfortably on the Martian surface, fruitlessly soaking up the Sun's rays through dust-coated solar panels to recharge failing batteries.

Her mission to search for evidence of water on Mars was complicated by the hostile environment, but Spirit persevered in the face of adversity. While racing to her first winter haven, Spirit broke her right front wheel. The injured rover was reduced to driving backwards for the rest of her lifetime, dragging the faulty wheel like an anchor. Surprisingly, the inert wheel broke the surface of the ground, digging a narrow trench behind the rover that led to one her of most famous discoveries: evidence of silica-rich soil that indicates the past existence of hot springs or steam vents on Mars' surface.

In addition to scientific discovery, Spirit contributed to our aesthetic appreciation of Mars, beaming back images conveying the sheer awe of witnessing an alien vista. In 2005, Spirit climbed Husband Hill—the height of the Statue of Liberty—and took a breathtaking panoramic picture that embodies the barren solitude of the Martian surface, a landscape never before witnessed in such detail by humankind.

Amidst life-threatening challenges, Spirit always found a way to transform hardship into achievement. Despite sunlight-choking dust storms, low-power situations in deep winter and hardware glitches triggered by harsh cosmic rays, she spectacularly outlasted her design specifications, never gave up and never stopped teaching us about the Martian environment.

In addition to her estranged sister rover, Opportunity (currently exploring the other side of Mars), the Spirit Rover is survived by an identical test rover on Earth and a father rover, FIDO, used for proof-of-concept experiments in the Nevada desert. Surviving relatives are joined in bereavement by the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, many of whom consider Spirit to be a member of their family. According to her last wishes, Spirit will remain on Mars indefinitely, with her final resting place becoming a region of international historical significance.